Age Right Victoria Privacy Policy
Updated October 2021
1. Introduction
Our practice, Age Right, is committed to best practice in relation to the management of information we collect. This practice has developed a policy to protect patient privacy in compliance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (‘the Privacy Act’). Our policy is to inform you of:
- The kinds of information that we collect and hold, which, as a medical practice, is likely to be ‘health information’ for the purposes of the Privacy Act;
- How we collect and hold personal information;
- The purposes for which we collect, hold, use and disclose personal information;
- How you may access your personal information and seek the correction of that information;
- How you may complain about a breach of the Australian Privacy Principles and how we will deal with such a complaint;
- Whether we are likely to disclose personal information to overseas recipients;
2. What kinds of personal information do we collect?
The type of information we may collect and hold includes;
- Your name, address, date of birth, email and contact details
- Medicare number, DVA number and other government identifiers, although we will not use these for the purposes of identifying you in our practice
- Other health information about you, including:
- notes of your symptoms or diagnosis and the treatment given to you
- Your specialist reports and test results
- your appointment and billing details
- your prescriptions and other pharmaceutical purchases
- your genetic information
- your healthcare identifier
- any other information about your race, sexuality or religion, when collected by a health service provider
- family medical history
3. How do we collect and hold personal information?
We will generally collect personal information
- From you directly when you provide your details to us. This might be via a face to face discussion, telephone conversation, registration form or online form.
- Medical Enduring Power of Attorney / medical decision maker / next of kin nominated.
- From third parties where the Privacy Act or other law allows it – this may include, but is not limited to: other members of your treating team, diagnostic centres, specialists, hospitals, the My Health Record system, electronic prescription services, Medicare, your health insurer, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and SafeScript.
4. Why do we collect, hold, use disclose personal information?
In general, we collect, hold, use and disclose your personal information for the following purposes:
- To provide health services to you.
- To comply with our legal obligations, including, but not limited to, mandatory notification of communicable diseases or mandatory reporting under applicable aged care protection.
- To help us manage our accounts and administrative services, including billing, arrangements with health funds, pursuing unpaid accounts, management of our IT systems.
- For consultations with other doctors and allied health professional involved in your healthcare;
- To obtain, analyse and discuss test results from diagnostic and pathology laboratories.
- For identification and insurance claiming.
- If you have a My Health Record, to upload your personal information to, and download your personal information from, the My Health Record system.
- To liaise with your health fund, government and regulatory bodies such as Medicare, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
- Permission to share a copy of your medical letters with your nominated family / medical decision treatment maker will be discussed with you.
- Our software has a patient portal which holds your investigations and letters which you can access or your nominated representative.
5. How can you access and correct your personal information?
- You have a right to seek access to, and correction of the personal information which we hold about you. For details on how to access and correct your health record, please contact our practice as noted below under ‘Contact Details’.
- For legal reasons, the medical records are time stamped and encrypted so corrections / concerns will be noted in the notes as new record.
- We will normally respond to your request within 30 days.
6. How do we hold your personal information?
Our staff are trained and required to respect and protect your privacy. We take reasonable steps to protect information held from misuse and loss and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. This includes:
- Holding your information on an encrypted database
- Holding your information in secure cloud storage / secure server
- Our staff sign confidentiality agreements
- Our practice has document retention and destruction policies
- Our staff are provided with individual password protection
6.1 Protection of health information
It is important that patients have confidence their health information is being treated respectfully and with consideration to privacy and confidentiality. Privacy and confidentiality of patient information needs to be considered in all situation including discussions between staff members and telephone conversations between staff and patient.
Patient records and computer screens will be positioned so that confidential information is not visible to anybody but the appropriate members of the practice team.
7. Privacy related questions and complaints
If you have any questions about privacy-related issues or wish to complain about a breach of the Australian Privacy Principles or the handling of your personal information by us, you may lodge your complaint in writing to (see below for details). We will normally respond to your request within 30 days.
If you are dissatisfied with our response, you may refer the matter to the OAIC:
Phone: 1300 363 992
Email: enquiries@oaic.gov.au
Fax: +61 2 9284 9666
Post: GPO Box 5218 Sydney NSW 2001
Website: www.oaic.gov.au
8. Overseas disclosure
We may disclose your personal information to the following overseas recipients:
- Any practice or individual who assists us in providing services (such as where you have come from overseas and had your health record transferred from overseas or have treatment continuing from an overseas provider) overseas transcription services, overseas based cloud
- Anyone else to whom you authorise us to disclose it
9. Updates to this Policy
This Policy will be reviewed from time to time to take account of new laws and technology, changes to our operations and other necessary developments. Updates will be publicised on the practice’s website.
10. Privacy and websites
Age Right policy will be made available on our practice’s website as well as in the Age Right Database.
11. Contact details for privacy related issues
Name: Dr Kelly Wright
Telephone number: 03 9020 4220
Email Address: admin@ageright.com.au or kelly@ageright.com.au
Post Address: Suite 1, 1949-1957 Malvern Rd, Malvern East 3145
